Being Kikuyu in Meru: Challenging the Tribal Geography of Colonial Kenya*

Journal of African History, (), pp. –. © Cambridge University Press doi:./S BEING KIKUYU IN MERU: CHALLENGING THE TRIBAL GEOGRAPHY OF COLONIAL KENYA* BY TIMOTHY PARSONS Washington University ABSTRACT: Faced with a confusing range of fluid ethnicities when they conquered Kenya, colonial officials sought to shift conquered populations into manageable administrative units. In linking physical space to ethnic identity, the Kenyan reserve system assumed that each of these ‘tribes’ had a specific homeland. Yet the reserves in the central Kenyan highlands soon became overcrowded and socially restive because they could not accommodate population growth and private claims to land for commercial agriculture. Although colonial officials proclaimed themselves the guardians of backward tribal peoples, they tried to address this problem by creating mechanisms whereby surplus populations would be ‘adopted’ into tribes living in less crowded reserves. This article provides new insights into the nature of identity in colonial Kenya by telling the stories of two types of Kikuyu migrants who settled in the Meru Reserve. The first much larger group did so legally by agreeing to become Meru. The second openly challenged the colonial state and their Meru hosts by defiantly proclaiming themselves to be Kikuyu. These diverse ways of being Kikuyu in the Meru Reserve fit neither strict pri- mordial nor constructivist conceptions of African identity formation. The peoples of colonial Kenya had options in deciding how to identify themselves and could assume different political and social roles by invoking one or more of them at a time and in specific circumstances. KEY WORDS: Kenya, colonial administration, ethnicity. TEMPERS ran high at Meru local native council (LNC) meetings in early . The councilors were considering assertions by their counterparts in the densely populated Kiambu District that the Meru should allow landless Kikuyu to settle amongst them on the grounds that all of the agrarian communities of the Kenyan highlands were members of the same ‘tribe’. These were tense times. The would-be migrants had been turned off settler farms and out of the over-crowded Kikuyu heartland. Having reserved the most fertile regions of the highlands for European settlers, the Kenyan government struggled to find room for an expanding, highly entrepreneurial, Kikuyu population that had outgrown its ‘native reserves’. Although colonial administrators had little idea that within three years their tribally-based constrictive land policies would provoke the ‘Mau Mau Emergency’, a revolt by landless young Kikuyu, they recognized that the security of British rule depended on finding space for the tens of thousands of desperate Kikuyu who * I am grateful to Richard Waller and the members of the International and Area Studies Migration and Identity Worskhop at Washington University for their comments on this article. Author’s email: [email protected] TIMOTHY PARSONS did not fit within the imperial geography of Kenya. Consequently, district officers were ready to encourage Kikuyu settlement in less crowded reserves even though the Kiambu district commissioner acknowledged that other communities feared that people from his district were ‘trying to set up Kikuyu colonies on their land’. The Meru LNC recoiled at the Kiambu councilors’ assertion that the Meru were really just Kikuyu who had been cut off from the Kikuyu heartland. Stressing their cultural distinctiveness, the council complained that Kikuyu interlopers seized high quality land and rejected the authority of Meru tribunals. Yet the councilors also carefully divided the migrants into two distinct categories. Reverend Cornelio M’Mukira explained that the Meru had a longstanding practice of accepting any outsider willing to be adopted into a Meru clan as ‘muchiarwa’. In his eyes, the problem was the Kikuyu ‘murombi’ who farmed a piece of land on a limited basis. The former term was most likely derived from guchiarwa, meaning ‘to be born’, which referred to the fictive blood relationships that developed between Meru families and clans. A murombi, conversely, was a stranger and a beggar. These assimilative practices were not unique, and the Kikuyu themselves also accepted outsiders into their mbari (lineages) as aciarua. Detailed evidence about the adoption process is scant, but it appears that the Meru absorbed significant numbers, probably totaling in the thousands, of Kikuyu and other outsiders as guchiarwa during the colonial era. Indeed, the Meru district commissioner noted that there were plenty of people from other tribes in his district, some from as far away as Tanganyika, who had become ‘perfectly good Meru’. Assimilation into a new community entailed a loss of wealth and status, but it appears that many landless Kikuyu accepted this burden as the price of gaining access to land. One could move from one ‘tribe’ to another if the adoptee and prospective hosts were sufficiently willing. This was possible because there were indeed significant cultural and linguistic continuities among the various agrarian communities of the highlands. These included patrilineal reckoning of descent, patrilocal marriage practices, and the organization of society around age sets. While shifting or redefining ethnic identity is never easy, the tense exchanges between the Kiambu and Meru LNCs were born of a much larger controversy in British-ruled Kenya that linked identity with physical space, land tenure, economic accumulation, and social status. RETHINKING TRIBALISM AND IDENTITY Ethnicity is a seductively useful frame, which groups people into coherent and bounded categories based on a shared set of characteristics. East African Kenya National Archives (KNA) Nairobi, PC CP ///a, Kiambu local native council (LNC) minutes, Nov. KNA PC CP ///, District Commissioner (DC) Meru to Provincial Commissioner (PC) Central Province (CP), Dec. ; KNA OPE ///,DC Meru to PC CP, Apr. I am grateful to Patrick Thimangu for the translations and suggested etymology of the Meru terms. H. E. Lambert, Kikuyu Social and Political Institutions (London, ), –. BEINGKIKUYUINMERU colonial governments in particular sought to shift conquered populations, whose statelessness seemed chaotic and confusing, into understandable and manageable administrative units. Conveniently, they assumed that tribes were less advanced than nations, and thus the British version of the new imperialism was moral and defensible because primitive tribesmen could not govern themselves. By official imperial thinking, these ‘tribes’ had a common language, uniform social institutions, and rigid customary laws based on the perception of kinship. In practice, colonial categories of identity were largely innovative and imprecise. Their artificiality and ‘weakness’ led John Iliffeto make the now famous observation that ‘the British wrongly believed that Tanganyikans belonged to tribes; Tanganyikans created tribes to function within the colonial framework.’ Iliffe’s epigrammatic summary helped launch a historiographical reconsideration of ethnicity that treated colonial- era ethnic identities as the recent, if not explicitly invented, products of human agency, and that, over time, argued for the importance of African influence as well as colonial imagination. The older men who successfully claimed the status of chiefs, thereby earning the right to speak for their tribes, and the patriots who embraced tribal identities to assert control over women and younger men were equally invested in promoting these collectivist identities. These constructivist and instrumentalist perspectives help to explain why and how contemporary Kenyan supra-tribes like the Mijikenda, Kalenjin, and Luhya emerged in the twentieth century. Moreover, this scholarship usefully punctures colonial-era stereotypes of ahistorical African tribalism. It risks, however, overstating the capacity of both African cultural brokers and imperial administrators to entirely create new ethnic identities. Thomas Spear argues persuasively that instrumentalist and constructivist analyses miss key continuities between the pre-conquest and colonial eras and cannot explain either the power or the content of contemporary tribalism. The case of the Kikuyu migrants in Meru brings some clarity to this debate by paying greater attention to how individuals defined themselves in relation to their position in the tribal geography of colonial Kenya, for individual perspectives and ambitions are often lost in the theoretical literature on ethnicity in colonial Africa. This study therefore moves beyond literate culture brokers whose accessible and legible output may too easily dominate analysis by focusing on the decisions of ordinary people not simply in a world of affect and cultural continuity, but in immediate concerns over their own J. Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (New York, ), . A. W. Southall, ‘The illusion of tribe’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, :– (), ; L. Vail, ‘Introduction: ethnicity in Southern African history’, in L. Vail (ed.), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (London, ), . J. Lonsdale, ‘Writing competitive patriotism in Eastern Africa’, in D. Peterson and G. Macola (eds.), Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa (Athens, OH, ), . J. Willis, Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda (Oxord, ); G. Lynch, I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya (Chicago, ). T. Spear, ‘Neo-traditionalism and the limits of invention in British colonial Africa’, Journal

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